A Shift From ‘Soft Power’ Diplomacy in Cuts to the State Dept.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson was on the other side of the planet on Thursday when the Trump administration announced that it would slash his department’s budget by 31 percent, potentially eliminating thousands of jobs.

Instead of announcing the cuts in person, Mr. Tillerson sent a nine-sentence email from Japan to his staff stating that “U.S. engagement must be more efficient,” and that the budget was “a genuine opportunity to set a new course.”

The passive tone fit the message of the president’s budget: Use less “soft power,” the cajoling and persuading of allies and enemies, and replace it with the projection of “hard power” by the nation’s military.

Efforts to overhaul the State Department arrive at Foggy Bottom about as often as a 13-year cicada, an insect that emerges from the soil on the nearby Mall to great noise and annoyance but little effect. Veterans of previous overhauls have tried to reassure junior colleagues in recent days that things are never as dire as they seem when such plans are announced, partly because Congress — where some department initiatives are born or nurtured for decades — rarely consents to drastic change.

Many educational and cultural exchange programs designed to improve the United States’ image would be abolished or pared back to pay for an increase in military spending. The Global Climate Change Initiative and a number of envoys and offices created during the Obama administration are slated for elimination.

Among the nations of the world, only Israel is guaranteed under the budget to keep its level of assistance, which at $3.1 billion a year is far more than goes to any other country. The Trump budget also proposes protecting programs that buy and distribute drugs fighting H.I.V.-AIDS and malaria.

In a hearing on Thursday, Representative Harold Rogers, the powerful Kentucky Republican who leads the House Appropriations Committee, denounced the proposed cuts to “soft warfare” efforts. He said he was “absolutely shocked at the administration’s puny request for this worldwide effort to defeat” the Islamic State.

Many at the department quietly agree that it grew top-heavy in recent years, with overlapping bureaus and authorities that some hoped would be streamlined. But a 31 percent cut would take a meat ax to the department, not a scalpel, these people say.

At a news conference in Tokyo, Mr. Tillerson said the State Department would be able to save money because “as time goes by, there will be fewer military conflicts that the U.S. will be directly engaged in.” And other countries will contribute more in such things as disaster assistance, he said.

Mark Toner, a department spokesman, said in a news conference, “We’re also going to be looking for other countries to stand up and do more,” in an echo of similar calls by President Trump.

But veteran diplomats said that injecting money into the Defense Department while slashing the State Department made little sense, since the functions of the two go hand-in-hand. “We learned in both Iraq and Afghanistan that our military needs an effective civilian partner if victories on the battlefields are going to be converted into a sustainable peace,” Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser to President George W. Bush, said in an interview.

But James J. Carafano, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a member of the Trump transition team, noted that the Obama administration had increased spending on the State Department only to see America’s standing in the world decline. “People argue that spending on State is some magic elixir, but it’s not,” Mr. Carafano said. “The instruments of national security need to be measured on their own merits.”